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  #71  
Unread 09-16-2010, 07:57 AM
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Mary Meriam Mary Meriam is offline
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Cally and Jerome - I subscribe to The New Yorker.
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  #72  
Unread 09-17-2010, 12:06 PM
Orwn Acra Orwn Acra is offline
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I've just realized a few of his poems are in the "New Yorker Book of Poems" I own (a pretty great anthology, too, since it stops at 1969 and thus cuts out all the latter day awful stuff). So glad to know where to find "the Judgment"! Thanks, Jerome.
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  #73  
Unread 09-19-2010, 05:29 PM
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Default Perfect Companion.

Reading of R.P.’s walking adventures across Finland, Lapland, Sweden, and Norway. It is beautifully written, funny and touching. His walking accompanied by Carla (an American girl he meets by chance) is the last part of the book, but the best, I think. It describes in a very reserved English way what I take to be a great and enduring love.Its tone reminds me of Michael Palin, but the writing is much better, although I rate Michael’s writing highly.

“Carla was a perfect travelling companion. She was inexhaustibly good-humoured, and never, even in the most trying circumstances, displayed the slightest irritation. She was delightful to look at, interesting to talk to, an ingenious contriver, an admirable cook and a skilled performer on the flute. We had discussed seriously, along the Syvajarvi trail, whether, in view of our total compatibility of temperaments, it was our unavoidable duty to marry each other, and had decided, for one reason or another, that it was not. From then on, as before, we travelled in a condition of infinite harmony and mutual aid. P.222.”

“So we parted, as suddenly as we had met. I met Carla on the boat up the Great Water from Saltoluokta, as it docked at Sjofallet. Within a couple of hours, we set off up the trail from Vakkotavare together. Since then we had been together for six weeks and a day, night and day, except for five nights spent in youth hostels. During that time we had not exchanged one unkind or impatient word. Such things are rare. Perhaps our greatest stroke of serendipity was at the beginning, when we met each other.p.255”

“I made this journey in my fiftieth year, being still-and even after it-capable of reasonable activity, though essentially frail; for which good fortune I humbly thank any deity or other supernatural power who may be listening.p.256.” Journey In Lapland. Chapman and Hall.1965.

I have arranged to meet Richard at his home in London in mid-October. If there are any questions people want me to ask please PM me.

Apologies for the lack of correct accents on the Swedish/Finnish place names.
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  #74  
Unread 10-16-2010, 03:28 AM
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Default Time travel.

Just another snippet on R.P. before I go to London next Tuesday to meet him.

R. P. Lister told CA: "I started writing poetry when I was six. Science attracted me in my boyhood; I wanted to know how the world worked. An interest in people and the arts took over gradually from my teens, and in my early thirties, already contributing poems and articles to British and American periodicals, I took to writing full time. Novels to begin with; then other lifelong interests, history and topography, called for attention, and besides the novels books of travel and history, and even the two combined, demanded to be written. I paint too; I always have, but in recent years it has become a major interest. I have had a one-man show in London and sold a few score of pictures. I should write music too, if I had the time . . . not to mention sculpture, and a few other things. Twenty lifetimes would not suffice for all that cries out to be written, painted, carved, played, sung. But I shall concentrate in time; when I am eighty-five I shall go back to my first love and do nothing but write lyric poems."

Source: Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2003.

Gale Database: Contemporary Authors
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  #75  
Unread 10-16-2010, 04:18 AM
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Janice D. Soderling Janice D. Soderling is offline
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This is such an exciting quest. R.P.s fan club extends into Sweden.

Lovely that he has been on Saltoluokta, I've climbed in that region myself so am mentally bonding with him on a second level. I am sure this will be thrilling for you Steve, and by extension, for us all.
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  #76  
Unread 10-17-2010, 11:30 AM
Alex Pepple Alex Pepple is offline
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This thread really belongs in the Musing on Mastery forum, and that's where it is now. I'll leave a month-long redirect here (GT) so those following it can locate it there.

Cheers,
...Alex
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  #77  
Unread 10-19-2010, 06:20 PM
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Default Visiting R.P. Lister.

I finally made it to London and met Richard today. It was an honour and a pleasure to meet him and his friend Meg, who took the picture. I returned to Sheffield carrying signed books and unpublished R.P. Lister poems. I'm back at work now but hope to give a full account of our meeting when I get the time this weekend.

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The Thames at Westminster.

Earth hath not anything to show more fair,
and that's quite strange, for no one ever planned it.
It's quite haphazard, like a one-armed bandit.
The English people, being of the ages heir,
has never stopped to think where it was going.
Sometimes it gets there without knowing,
and, having got there , it will stand and stare,
saying, in wonderment: "What, are we there?
Really, old boy, I can't quite understand it."

R.P.Lister.The Albatross and other poems. 1986.
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  #78  
Unread 10-19-2010, 06:35 PM
Cally Conan-Davies Cally Conan-Davies is offline
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WOW!

You could be father and son!

Can't wait to hear the story!

Cally - clapping!
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  #79  
Unread 10-20-2010, 06:43 AM
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A real pleasure to see the men behind the words.
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  #80  
Unread 10-23-2010, 07:35 AM
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Default The Questing Beast.

The Questing Beast.

I feel like the questing beast as I make my way down to London to meet Richard Percival Lister for the first time. In one of the legends the patchwork beast pines for the chivalric knight who has grown too ancient to hunt him, and so, in his loneliness, sets off to search him out.

I enter the Underground labyrinth warily, having to cross London and change lines at Oxford Circus.”Serious Delays Expected” on the Victoria line alarms me, but I wait patiently and the first tube train rushes in.

I visit London rarely, but since the bombs of 2005 I’m sure something has changed. People on the Tube are conscious of each other, conscious of proximity and dependence. I see people offer their seats to others who might be in more need, people talk a little more, and people keep an eye on each other. There is a sense of shared frailty and togetherness.

Without incident I emerge at Holland Park. Adrienne has led me through a Google reconnaissance of the route I must take, so the streets look familiar. I get the odd feeling of this being the way home. I stop for a bottle of wine at an Off-licence I knew would be there.

At the top of the street I spot a little emissary looking out for me. That must be Meg, Richard’s good friend and support who has helped organise this meeting. I plant a kiss on her surprised cheek before she has time to say hello. Richard has been getting impatient.

As we enter the door of his flat Richard has already launched his tall, unsteady self into the air to grasp my hand and welcome me in. I know him immediately from the good likeness captured in the Elena Jahn Clough drawing on the back cover of “A Journey in Lapland.” He has a Sherlock Holmes-like mien enlivened with extra wit and brightness.

Meg organises us, sits us down, feeds us delicacies and opens the wine. The small sitting room is full of light. I am conscious of Richard’s own jewel-like paintings on the walls, of books, of the piano at my arm with music from Bach and Beethoven resting on it.

I am not at a loss, as I feared I might be, but talk too much, trying to give Richard some sense of what his writing means to me, and how others here on the Sphere are enjoying his work. He chuckles indulgently and surprises Meg by fluently quoting his own poetry back to me.

I tell him of the emblematic importance his poem “Ballade on Experience” has for me. Its refrain: “Everything has not happened to me yet” has become a guide for me. Its last lines prefigured our meeting:

“Most noble Prince, empanoplied and spurred,
Do not despair because we have not met;
Although my back is bent, my vision blurred,
Everything has not happened to me yet.”

We spend the next hour enjoying a heady ping-pong of lines from Richard’s poems. I tease him about his “genius”, and he acknowledges and accepts the appellation. We read his “Genius Defined.” From The Idle Demon.

Genius is a common factor found
In many widely different kinds of man,
As, for example, Plato, Petrarch, Pound,
Cervantes, Caesar, Socrates, Cezanne,

Marlborough, Milton, Mendelssohn, Mozart,
Puccini, Pushkin, Proust, Picasso, Poe,
Beethoven, Botticelli, Bonaparte,
Mohammed, Mendel, Michelangelo,

El Greco, Gorki, Gaugin, Goethe, Grock,
Defoe, Debussy, Darwin, Dante, Drake,
Canova, Casanova, Caradoc,
Bach, Belisarius, Bunyan, Buddha, Blake,

Tolstoy, Tertullian, Turner, Trumper, Tree,
Machiavelli, Moliere, and me.

We laugh a lot. We talk about Time, which is one of the great themes of his poetry. I read his “Tarry Awhile Time” to him and Meg. It has rich echoes of Marvell and Rochester for me. Richard loves Shakespeare, the Metaphysicals, and the Classics. His Grandfather passed on to him a depth of reading and a love of literature. I get the impression that, like me, Richard is mostly self-taught in literature. Unlike me, he is a self-taught linguist. He loves Dante and joyfully launches into the first Canto of The Divine Comedy to entertain us. I quiz him on some Kafka-like echoes I catch in his novel “The Way Backwards”. And yes, of course, he was reading Kafka in German at the time. I marvel; he is a natural for the Sphere. He may have lacked “circularity”, but would have found a “spherical” home here.

Richard describes his own formative experience of workshopping when he first lived in London with a group called “The Saturdays” which met in Wigmore Street off Oxford Street. It’s here I think he first began to develop his facility in verse. Each week a subject would be picked from a hat and the group members would each write a poem in fifteen minutes. Each had their own “Grey Book” of poems or ideas for poems. This is where Richard first began to believe in himself as a poet. Later on he told me he was encouraged by Siegfried Sassoon to collect and publish his poetry.

Richard has always enjoyed his visits to America, staying in Arizona and Michigan with friends. He has fond memories of New York and of publishing his poems in The New Yorker and spending many convivial evenings with its editor Howard Moss in Greenwich Village.

When I ask Richard to recommend his best novel for me to read he tells me “Ah, that will be “The Covered City”, an unpublished novel of mine.” This sounds fascinating: a novel set in a future when London is roofed over, and on that roof another city grows.”Not Science-Fiction” Richard quickly says, “a novel about people”. At the time publishers said it was too long, but when he rewrote it and cut it down it lost too much. Later on I see this large pale- blue manuscript sitting on a shelf in Richard’s bedroom. As Richard himself says, some of his unpublished, uncollected works “still haunt me.” It makes me hope that if I can play any small part in bringing these writings into the light then my quest will have been successful.

Richard continues to write poetry, although his main preoccupation from about 1980 has been painting. He writes elsewhere: “ In 1980 people started buying my paintings, so I took to painting in all the time I had available to me. Painting from then on occupied me happily and kept me alive for the next ten years.” He quotes Cezanne and Van Gogh as influences on his own art. His sense of colour is strong. The paintings I saw were jewel-like, almost Klee-like at times, verging on abstraction. The sense of enjoyment and pleasure in life shines through these paintings as it does through his writing. No wonder the paintings sold well!

Through his shared interest in painting with Meg, Richard has enjoyed many painting, walking and writing holidays at Bussas in France. He also still actively pursues his love of music: attending concerts and the ballet in London with Meg and friends. As someone wrote in a scrapbook of tributes for his 90th birthday, he truly is “a Renaissance Man.”

It has been a life-changing experience for me to meet Richard. He gives me a sense that all is still possible. He believes in life, and gets such pleasure from life while acknowledging its frailty. Like all of us he admits to feeling “low in the water” at times, yet his poems seduce and outwit time. He is a true gentle Knight and Troubadour. What does age matter? I quote the last two stanzas of “The Troubadour” from The Idle Demon:

His bones seek their Jerusalem; and mine
Creep yet another stage
By song and tourney and the crimson wine
Towards old age.

But age, for troubadours? A song not sung
Haunts me again, as in the straw I lie,
Knowing the world still young, myself still young,
And all Provence, and its wide sky.

I departed later that day, catching the train back to Sheffield, bearing signed copies, carrying unpublished poems, quite happy to have met such a remarkable man. I hope many more people will come to read him again and share the pleasure of his company. Richard remains frail, as we all are, but this “frailty” has lasted him for many years, and I hope for many more years to come. He is surrounded by loving friends, Meg’s grandchildren, and books. As I was leaving I spot “The Rings of Saturn” by W.G.Sebald lying on a shelf. A fellow-walker, thinker, writer. Richard is still reading, still writing, still keeping up-to-date.

I realise I have only scratched the surface of all we talked about, but I hope to meet Richard again and say much more. I will finish this piece with an unpublished poem from Richard written in October 2007:

Darling Death.

Come and get me, darling Death,
But not yet:
There’s a lot worth living for.
So don’t forget
To wait until I’ve drawn my very final breath.

And even then I might have more
To say or do before I go.
So
Be reasonably slow.

To be in haste
Would be in the very worst of taste.
There’s a great deal I have to do;
Some of it old, some of it new.
Some tales to tell, some pots to glue.

And even then, there might be more to come.
“O the brave music of a distant drum!”
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